Literacy curricula tend
to be imposed on schools and teachers by national or local government agencies.
Consideration is sometimes given to the views of the teachers who have to implement
such national policies but rarely to the views of the most crucial participants
– the learners themselves. Finding out the perceptions about literacy and its
teaching held by students can be an important element of effective instruction.
In this paper we report briefly upon one attempt to do this.

Introduction

Nationally imposed curricula for literacy
are now a significant feature in the educational landscape in many countries.
These national approaches have received strong criticism, especially because of
their ‘one size fits all’ model. Criticism internationally has generally
focused on the point that such approaches undervalue the contribution that
skilful, creative teachers can make to effective literacy instruction.

But these nationally imposed curricula for literacy also make it difficult for literacy teachers to take account of the perceptions of the students they teach. Learner perceptions of literacy and its teaching can radically affect the outcomes of literacy instruction and teachers of literacy need to take some steps to understand these in their own instructional contexts.A one-sentence paragraph is not appropriate.

Previous research

The 1970s and 80s saw a number of significant investigations into
learners’ perceptions of literacy, perhaps best exemplified by the
investigations of Downing (e.g. 1986) into what he termed ‘cognitive clarity’,
by which he meant the understandings that learners need to develop about the
functions and features of written language.not clear, break up -nto
2-3 sentences What emerged from studies like these was a picture
of general confusion, among younger students at least, about the purposes and
mechanisms of literacy. Students were not clear about why they were learning to
read and why they were being asked to carry out the activities they were.

We carried out two studies of
our own in the early 90s which added to this picture. Medwell
(1991) investigated the perceptions of reading held by elementary school
students and the way these related to what these readers were trying to do when
they read. She found that the poorer the readers, the more likely they were to
be using only graphophonic cues in reading and the more likely they were to be
confused about what reading was and how you did it. Poorer readers appeared to have a very
narrow concept of reading and a very limited range of strategies for
approaching it. you are discussing a variables called Poorer readersandGood readersbut
how did you measure it, define it?
Good readers generally had a much more balanced view
of reading and were more meaning-focused in their attempts to read.

Wray
(1993) investigated students’ perceptions of writing by collecting written comments
from 475 children, aged between 7 and 11 years. The results showed an
overwhelming preoccupation with the secretarial aspects of writing. This seemed
like powerful evidence that, somehow or
other, these children had gained the impression that what really mattered in
the writing they did in their classrooms were the technical aspects.

Theoretical
frameworks

The research mentioned above
was set in a context of burgeoning interest in metalinguistic
awareness. The basic principle here was the assumption that if learners’ metalinguistic awareness could be enhanced, this would lead
to an increase in their literacy competence. Evidence about the success of this
is mixed. Yet its very expression puts it at odds with current ways of thinking
about learning and development. Metalinguistic awareness was conceived as
something learners had,-that is,
it was a part of their individual psyche. Currently such individualistic
notions of cognition are out of fashion and a more socially constructed view is
generally accepted.{There are
lots of generalities here purported as factual evidence but where is the
support for them?]

In terms of curriculum, one of
the effects of this shift of interest[According to whom?]
from the individual to the social has been a realisation that the experiences
provided for learners in classrooms are not the crucial factor in what these
learners take away from their schooling. Of more significance is the curriculum
that learners construct in their heads – a construction inherently social in
nature. To put this simply, a curriculum cannot just be delivered to learners with predictable effects.

As an example of this, take
the case of the teaching activity known internationally as ‘shared reading’,
involving which involves a teacher sharing the reading of a text aloud[?]
with a whole class. The rationale for this activity is that the teacher can
model for learners how to read and make sense of a text. In the research study
we will describe later, two 8 year old students had this to say when asked,
‘How do you feel about reading together with the whole class?’

Student 1: ‘We don’t read
together as a class. Miss just reads to us from the big book’.

Student 2: ‘I like reading with
the whole class … because it helps me when we come to a word I don’t know’.

Here are two students who have
had exactly the same curriculum delivered to them, sitting together in the same
room in front of the same teacher. Yet they have each constructed radically
different curricula from this experience. Such illustrations suggest that in
trying to understand literacy teaching in classrooms, a crucial step to take is
to gain some insight into what the learners are making of the experiences they
are offered.

Current approaches
to the teaching of literacy in many countries might best be described as
‘managerialist’. offer some sourcesThey
are largely determined by the requirements placed upon teachers from above,
either from national/federal governments or from more local bodies. [Support
for these statements?]Participants in the teaching of literacy
(schools, teachers, learners) are generally assumed to be more alike than
different, with the effect that their individual differences and perceptions
are downplayed in policy and pedagogy. Although teachers are required to
implement teaching approaches, national strategies such as the National
Literacy Strategy in the United Kingdom and ‘No Child Left Behind’ in
the USA assume that there will be
relatively little flexibility in this implementation.

These national
approaches have received strong criticism from a variety of sources.[Which ones?]
Yet such critique has generally focused on the point that managerialist
approaches undervalue the contribution that creative teachers can make to
effective literacy instruction. In the USA, one
critical web site makes this point:

“The
insistence upon a particular approach to reading … is dangerous because it
deskills teachers, ignores decades of craft knowledge and places undue reliance
upon formulas and templates.” (http://nochildleft.com/2003/jan03.html#15)

A line of critique noticeably
missing, however, has been a consideration that teaching approaches can only
work well when they fit with the learners for whom they are designed. Modern
theories about pedagogy[Whoes theories?]
suggest that curriculum cannot be imposed upon learners but is actively
constructed by them. If this is the case, then the perceptions of the major
participants in learning, the learners, are of crucial importance in
understanding the nature of the experienced curriculum in classrooms.

Perceptions of the literacy hour

The United Kingdom’s National Literacy Strategy (NLS) was
established as a national initiative in 1997 with the aim of raising literacy
standards in English primary schools. The political impulse to target standards
arose from research findings which showed that Britain was generally
out-performed in international comparisons of literacy standards and that a
distinctive feature of British performance was the existence of a long “tail”
of underachievement greater than in other countries (Beard, 1998).

The NLS provided a
framework which set out termly teaching objectives.
Teachers were recommended a prescribed pattern of teaching (the literacy hour).[Since this is the focus, you
need to provide readers with a complete description.] For the
first time British teachers were told not only what to teach, but how to teach
it.

There has,
naturally, been considerable debate about the NLS and the research that
underpins it. In his review of this research, Beard (1998) recognised that
ultimately success would depend on the knowledge and skills of teachers and the
co-operation of parents and students. Teachers, researchers and others have all
commented on aspects of the strategy, but the views of one group, the students
themselves, have been under-represented.

The time seemed
ripe, therefore, for a detailed inquiry into what students thought about the
literacy hour. Our aim was to explore these perceptions among a sample of 297
students aged from 7 to 11, made up of boys and girls of various abilities,
using a mixture of survey and case study methods to gather evidence.[Way too general ]

·Interviews with three students
from each class (33 in total). Students were selected randomly but stratified
according to gender (at least one boy and girl from each class), and ability
(in each class one student considered above average, average and below average
was selected).

·Each of these interviewed students
(33 in total) was then observed during one literacy hour.

We do not have space
here for a full account of the results of this project, but will confine
ourselves to a review of the key issues.

Do students enjoy the
literacy hour?

Research by Smith
and Whiteley (2000) found that teachers believe that
students generally enjoy the literacy hour. Our research confirms that teachers
are correct in this but not in the case of every student. 61.8% of students
completing the questionnaire said they enjoyed the literacy hour and 72% of
students interviewed responded favourably when asked what they thought of it.
This leaves a substantial minority (30 – 40%) who do not enjoy the literacy
hour.

Some parts of the
literacy hour appeared more popular than others. ***Here you
should explain how you determined which parts of the literacy hour were more
popular than others.Further, how did
you measure enthusiasm?Please
explicate*** From the questionnaire 82.4% of students enjoyed
Shared Reading and Writing as a class and 65.1% were happy with the amount of
time spent on this activity. However, although students claimed to enjoy this
part of the lesson, their behaviour told a different story. Evidence from the
observations {Is this evidence based only on the 33 students?] showed
that only 61% of students appeared to be enthusiastic during this activity.
Levels of enthusiasm were higher during other parts of the hour. [How did
you measure enthusiasm?]

This leads us to
question why a higher percentage of students claimed to enjoy shared activity
than actually appeared to be enthused by it. ***Again, you
are discussing a variable called enthusiasm, but how did you measure it?***We
could speculate that one of the reasons this part of the lesson is popular is
that the work is undertaken together, reading or writing as a class. This
inevitably removes the pressure upon the individual to perform and may allow
some students to sit back and allow others to do the work, thus appearing
uninterested.

Gender differences

When the evidence
from the interview and the questionnaire was analysed in terms of gender, there
was little difference between the views expressed by boys and girls. This
result is perhaps surprising in the light of current anxieties[Source??]
about the underachievement of boys in literacy.

However, amongst the
less able students there did seem to be a relationship between gender and the
likelihood of appearing to be enthusiastic. More below average girls (50%) than
boys (28%) were judged to be enthusiastic. ***Again, need a
better definition of enthusiasm and how measurements were drived
and manipulated***

The results of the
interviews showed that the majority of students said they enjoyed the literacy
hour and that ability or gender did not appear to be a determining factor.
However, observations suggested that many lower ability students and, in
particular, lower ability boys did not appear to be interested or enthusiastic
about it.

More able students

Hanke (2000) and Hancock and Mansfield (2002) expressed concern that more
able students would become bored by the repetitive structure of the literacy
hour. Twenty eight percent 28%
of students who were interviewed did express negative views about
the literacy hour and boredom was mentioned regularly, although students who
used this word were spread evenly across the ability range.[So this
was an open ended questionnaire?]

Observations showed
that throughout the literacy hour more able students in general, and
particularly more able girls, were most likely to be on task, enthusiastic and
participating. This research has not found any evidence to suggest that the
more able are bored during the literacy hour.

Participation

The observations
showed that above average ability girls were most likely to be participating in
all parts of the literacy hour. Students of below average ability were least
likely to participate.

Several researchers
have expressed concern over the suitability of the literacy hour for students
of different abilities. Although this research has not found boredom among more
able students to be an issue, a significant proportion of students appeared not
to be participating in some parts of the lesson. Closer inspection shows that
these students were more likely to be the less able members of the class. ***Here
you would need to explain the tools you used to determine :”less
able” students.***

What type of texts did
students prefer?

The questionnaire
showed that for reading story was the most popular text type, chosen by 50.1%
of all students. The choice of text was important. 42.9% of boys and 31.5% of
girls agreed that the choice of text affected their level of enjoyment. If they
did not like the text, they were less likely to enjoy the
lesson.[Now it appears that the
questionnaire was a multiple choice variety.]

Research (e.g. Moss
1999) has frequently suggested that boys prefer non-fiction texts. However, in
this research we found that, for shared reading, story was the most popular
text type amongst boys, chosen by 54.3% of the boys. Poetry was most popular
amongst girls, chosen by 50%, closely followed by story at 45.9%. Only 12.2% of
students chose information texts as their preferred text type. This made
non-fiction the least popular text type overall.

As study of a shared
text is commonly followed in the literacy hour by a writing activity involving
a similar genre, we were interested to find out if this pattern was reflected
in students’ writing choices. Students were asked if they had a favourite type
of writing. More boys (33%) chose story as their favourite type of writing than
any other genre. More girls chose poetry as their favourite type of writing,
closely followed by story. Non-fiction was the least popular type of writing
amongst both genders.

Conclusion

The results of our
research into student perceptions of the literacy hour suggest that, on a
number of issues, teachers may have misconceptions about the effects of this
approach on their students.

Teachers appear to
be confident that their students enjoy the experience of the literacy hour. Our
data, however, suggests that this is not true for anything between 30 to 40% of
students. Although over 80% of students appeared to be enjoying activities like
shared reading, the reasons for their enjoyment may not be what teachers
suppose. Many fewer students exhibited enthusiasm during the lessons observed
and it could be that the reason some of them said they enjoyed shared reading
was simply that it made few demands upon them.

Teachers would
probably guess that the students who would enjoy their literacy work least
would be the less able and the boys, and in this our data supports them. Low
ability students, in particular boys, did seem to be enjoying their experiences
much less than other students. Of course, it was mainly for the benefit of such
lower ability students that the literacy hour was instituted in the first
place. While lack of enjoyment does not necessarily equate to lack of academic
progress, there is likely to be some relationship.

One of the principal
aims of the literacy hour approach was that literacy teaching should be
well-paced and interactive (DfEE, 1998), the point
being to maximise student participation rates in every lesson. Evidence is
beginning to emerge to question whether this has been achieved (Hardman, Smith
& Wall, 2003) and our data seems to confirm this doubt. Significant numbers
of our students were not participating in an active way in literacy lessons,
and did not wish to, and this was particularly the case with below-average
learners.

It has become almost
common-place to attribute one of the causes for the under-achievement of boys
in literacy to the types of texts they are asked to read and write in school.
Boys prefer non-fiction, so the argument goes, and schools tend to privilege
fiction, thus alienating young male students. Our data does not support this
assertion. In both reading and writing, non-fiction was the least popular text
type, even amongst boys.

It is our contention
that these are important findings which ought to have an influence upon the
ways teachers teach literacy. Yet we return to our main point: that such
insights cannot be gained unless we all, teachers and researchers, start taking
much more account of the views about literacy teaching held by those we teach.
Student perceptions matter, and we need to take much
more seriously the business of finding out what they are.

References

Beard, Roger. National
Literacy Strategy: Review of Research and other related Evidence. London, Department for Education and Employment,
1998.

Department for Education and Employment.The National Literacy Strategy: Framework
for TeachingLondon: HMSO, 1998.

Although I may personally agree with many of the
author’s statements, I can find no evidence/sources to support these statements
other than the author’s belief that they must be true.This lack of evidence places the study and
its results under suspicion.

There is very little detail provided as to the questionnaire,
methods, and even the format of the literacy hour.Many readers will be unfamiliar with this
latter term.

Ultimately, this study seems to
indicate that students are bored(although
how enthusiasm was measured is unknown).I was expecting, from the
title, a more complete picture as to how students
respond to the teaching format rather than learning that some are bored.Almost any group of students will respond in
some numbers that they are bored with school and its varied activities.